French, Fulani at laundromat. Mon, Jun 2, 2008.

06/02/2008. 1029. I was on the way to my regular laundromat, and took a detour in order to miss some street construction. This path took me past another smaller laundromat that I've been to only once before.

The thought of going to this one crossed my mind, but my regular laundromat is bigger, only four more blocks down the street, and a little less expensive, so my preference was to go to my regular one.

But the Spirit told me plainly that I should go here. Sometimes I go through an internal decision-making process to figure out if such an impression or prompting is real, or whether I'm imagining something. But there were two immediate factors that helped me decide. One was that the prompting was clear and forceful. The second was that I was being told something against my conscious desire. When we "gin up" a prompting, it's usually to justify something we want to do anyway. So both of those factors made it immediately obvious I needed to go here.

After I loaded up my clothes in one of the big washers, two gentlemen came in to remove their clothing from a washer and put it in a dryer. They appeared to be African, not African-American. The dryer they chose was within ear-shot, and though I couldn't make out what language they were speaking, it wasn't English.

When one of them walked by me, I asked what country they were from. They were from Niger, and spoke French and Fulani. I offered them some Church material in Fulani, and made sure to mention it was Christian, because they were Muslim. One of them spoke better English, so he appeared to be the senior partner, and I conversed with him.

I went out to the car and brought back in Fulani and English copies of Gospel Fundamentals, and a Fulani copy of the Joseph Smith Testimony pamphlet. They were very interested and browsed through them. But the one said that the pamphlet wasn't really in Fulani. The pamphlet did indicate on the back, and on the copyright page that it was "Fula" which is another name for "Fulani." But I have previously discovered printing errors before with other African language pamphlets, so it is possible that the cover and copyright page are one language, but the internal pages are another language.

Anyway, they accepted the Gospel Fundamentals, and I went back out to the car and brought back in some other French and English material, French and English copies of the Book of Mormon, French and English copies of "Our Heritage", French and English copies of the New Testament, and DVD videos of "Together Forever" and "Introduction to the Church."

He wasn't interested in the New Testaments, or the "Our Heritage", but he did accept both the French and English copy of the Book of Mormon, and the one "Together Forever" DVD.